An Austrian Court has ordered a local Internet service provider to block access to the largest torrent indexer in the world, The Pirate Bay. The lawsuit, launched by the rights owners, led to an injunction that ordered the Internet service providers to block access to a number of popular torrent websites, including The Pirate Bay, Isohunt.to, 1337x.to and h33t.to.

It is not a secret that The Pirate Bay is now one of the most censored sites, with courts all around the world ordering ISPs to block users’ access to the service and the list of such countries continues to expand.

Austria was the latest country to issue a blocking order. A complaint from the rights owners resulted in the order of the Commercial Court of Vienna to block subscribers’ access to The Pirate Bay, along with Isohunt.to, 1337x.to and h33t.to.

It will be up to service provider to choose how to implement the blockade, but most often used are DNS-blocking, IP-address blacklist or both. The consequences are the following: if the Austrian ISP chooses a DNS blockade, subscribers can easily circumvent it by using a non-ISP DNS server. A combination of two methods is usually more effective, but proxy sites and VPN services help to bypass them either.

It should be mentioned that the current court order comes right after another major blocking case in the country, which came to an end a few weeks ago after a round of appeals: finally, the Supreme Court ordered major ISPs in the country to block popular streaming services Movie4K.to and Kinox.to and bear the costs for future blockades.

The latest news from Austria show that more blocking requests may follow in the nearest future.

So, just how many flavours of Linux, phone apps, etc., do you think could be cooked-up for release exclusively through the aforementioned sites - since poor developers cannot afford the necessary bandwidth, themselves - each with "paid support" options that would make such IP blocks an unfair & illegal restriction on trade and on the rights & abilities of said developers to monetize their hard work?